Sprint + WiMax = ??
Dec 5, 2007
After last month's announcement that Sprint and Clearwire were ending their WiMax partnership, on the heels of Sprint CEO Gary Forsee resigning, it's been anybody's guess what the future holds for the telco's WiMax plans.
There were rumors last month that Google might acquire Sprint; yesterday, IP Democracy declared WiMax is dead on arrival in the U.S. and this morning Engadget cautiously confirmed that Sprint's soft launch of it's XOHM-branded WiMax service will take place in Chicago, D.C. and Baltimore "in the next few days."
Sprint's CFO and acting CEO Paul Saleh, who fielded questions about XOHM at UBS' Global Media & Communications Conference earlier this week, did his best to avoid going into much detail. But what he did say was telling.
In an effort to reassure investors that the company is focusing on the fundamentals, Saleh answered a question about the company's WiMax ambitions as follows:
Most of our attention right now is going to the core of our business...We're taking a much more cautious approach to our spending. We're also looking at ways of potentially financing this business in a way that would generate also high return on capital. So we're looking at ways of attracting capital to that business.
When pressed for more detail, he said there were a number of possibilities, including Sprint finding investors to fund a separate WiMax entity that would then sell services back to the telco. Saleh also clarified what he felt were misperceptions about the Sprint/Clearwire deal going south. He said that the deal "just became too complex," especially when it came to how the two companies would service customers in different geographic markets.
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